bacchantic

English

Alternative forms

• Bacchantic

Adjective

bacchantic (not comparable)

1. Bacchanalian; drunken or frenzied and unrestrained; orgiastic.
   • 1878, Friedrich Spielhagen, Through Night to Light, page 70:

     The orchestra played bacchantic music, and in bacchantic madness the dancers rushed by each other.

   • 1916, Edward Douglas Fawcett, The World as Imagination, page 469:

     There is a passage from chaos to cosmos marked by the "bacchantic" riots of Nature and even ourselves.

   • 1992, David Kolb, New Perspectives on Hegel's Philosophy of Religion, page 87:

     Yet nature is Spirit only in its otherness— self-alienated Spriit: "A bacchantic god innocent of restraint and reflection has merely been let loose into it " ( E §247z ) .

   • 2014, Julie Scott Meisami, Medieval Persian Court Poetry, page 279:

     the reason for this was twofold: insufficient acquaintance with the metaphors applied to public life and, on the other hand, sublimation on principle of all erotic and bacchantic elements into mystic allegory.

   • 2018, J.P. Sullivan, ‎Irene J.F. de Jong, Modern Critical Theory and Classical Literature, page 274:

     Indeed the Tereus episode resembles the Hecuba even more closely because it combines the motif of a conspiracy of women (a motif also parodied in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae, Lysistrata, and Ecclesiazusae) with the motif of bacchantic rage and collective violence . It is even possible that this bacchantic motif entered Ovid's tale via Sophocles' lost Tereus, though this is only conjecture.

2. Pertaining to the clergy or worship of Bacchus.
   • 1996, Contemporary Drama in English - Volumes 4-6, page 61:

     His friend Ted dancing the can-can trouserless with his shirt-tails flying, is an absurd equivalent to the bacchantic worshippers, who were supposed to don female dress during the rite.

   • 2011, Johannes Ehrat, Power of Scandal: Semiotic and Pragmatic in Mass Media, page 93:

     In this way the spectators were contextualized as participants in a rite (the chorus of bacchantic dancers and those assisting were originally not separated, either spatially or in their pragmatic roles), who had to perform rite (rightly) that which lay beyond them all.

   • 2021, Edward Ahearn, Rimbaud: Visions and Habitations, page 294:

     As am ecstatic city text it exemplifies the tendency to community, to festival, to love; and its bacchantic allusions remind us that Greek ecstatic religions were in part a protest against the restrictions of the urban, an effort to return to a more intense mode of existence.

References

• “bacchantic”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.